WITH THE C.I.V.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4295, 2 March 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

WITH THE C.I.V.

There is something rather piquant in the contrast between the bearer of so aristocratic a name as Erskine Childers, and his position as a humble driver in the ranks of the Volunteer Artillery who saileu for South Africa, at the beginning of last year. The author of tho brightly-written volume, “In. the Ranks of the C.1.V.,” was himself conscious of a vast change from the dignified seclusion of the House of Commons, where he held a position as clerk, to the open veldt and tho stirring milieu of a camp, while the public gain an almost unparalleled opportunity of learning the real cimcumstances of an artilleryman's daily life, described by one wlio has the necessary education and literary skill to pourtray the tails in vivid and vivacious terms. Even to those wearied of the perpetual stream of books dealing with the Boer war, Mr Childers’s graphic account oi the events of the campaign, his modest allusion to his own share in the various actions in which the C.I.V. took so active and useful a part, the incidental details of the country through which they passed, tho evenings by the camp fires, the long marches in the_ broiling sun—have a freshness and vigour of their own, which gives them a special charm. The whole hook, however, is hardly more than a stringing together of pages from a diary, some of which were hastily penned while under heavy fire from tho enemy’s guns, and there is no attempt at moralising, explaining, criticising, or any of the other forms of padding which encumber so many of the volumes already published on this war-worn subject of South Africa. The writer evidently laid to heart his own maxim. “Take what comes and don’t worry,’’ and seems to have borne all tbe discomforts and privations which fell to his lot in his new and strange situation with the courage and uncomplaining patience of the thoroughbred. As the result, he was able, on bis way homo, to sum. up his experience, with the result that ho found “little but good l in the retrospect.” “It is something,” ho writes, “bred up as we have been in a complex civilisation, to have reduced living to its simplest terms, and to have realised how little ono really wants. It is much to have learnt the discipline, self-restraint, endurance, and patience which soldiering demands, to have given up newspaper reading for a time and have stepped, oneself into the region where history is made.”